Council to Roll Out LED Street Lights Across Edinburgh

Energy efficient LED street lights will be rolled out across Edinburgh from later this month.

Edinburgh's 65,000 street lights currently cost around £3 million in energy alone every year. The Council calculates that replacing its inefficient and obsolete lanterns with longer-life, energy-saving LED lights, will generate savings of £54 million for the city over 20 years. Upgrading all the city’s street lights is budgeted at £24.5 million.

The roll-out follows a 2012 pilot project which replaced 271 lights in Gilmerton and Saughton Mains and a follow-up scheme in 2014 to replace around 7,000 obsolete lanterns in Edinburgh with LEDs.

Transport Convener Councillor Lesley Macinnes said: "Residents in the pilot areas for the new lights overwhelmingly said that they preferred the crisper, brighter light to the orangey glow of the old, inefficient street lights. As well as saving the city millions of pounds, replacing the old lights will help cut our CO2 emissions in Edinburgh and comply with Scottish Government energy efficiency legislation.”

A dynamic street lighting monitoring and control system (CMS) will also be installed, giving greater, centralised control over the city’s lighting.

The CMS will provide real-time monitoring and reporting to identify and track faults, which is hoped will cut the number of residents' complaints about broken street lights and remove the need for street lighting staff to undertake night-time scouting work to identify faulty lights.

It will also track energy consumption, submitting information directly to the Meter Administrator and increasing the accuracy of energy billing.

The “white light” LEDs and new technology will also enable community policing by making CCTV images clearer and by allowing light levels to be varied. Clothing colours and car registration numbers will be more easily identified with the new LED lighting technology.